THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: A TEST CASE 147

it would have occurred, it would have been very brief, for it
would have faced a practically unified people.

The reasons usually advanced for the impossibility of Russia's
finding a democratic mean between the autocracy of Czarism
and the autocracy of Bolshevism are such that they would also
"prove" the English and French Revolutions impossible.

Our main concern, however, is not with the particular
historical picture that would have unrolled itself if there had
been no October. And at this point we are not at all concerned
with its desirability. We believe that whether the world would
have been happier or unhappier, better or worse, at any rate
it would have been tremendously different; that future historians
will consider the October Revolution as a turning point which
opened a new era of weal and woe in the history of mankind;
and that, on the available evidence, they will attribute to the
event-making character of Nicolai Lenin the chief role in the
achievement of that revolution.

The foregoing analysis of the event-making significance
of Lenin in the Russian Revolution is still incomplete. It does
not warrant acceptance unless it can be sustained against the
thesis of one of the outstanding participants in its crucial
struggles who maintains that the Russian Revolution was in-
evitable. In his remarkable History of the "Russian ~&^volntiony
Leon Trotsky undertakes to prove, in conformity with Marxist
principles, that the October Revolution was the only path
possible in the development of Russia after the downfall of
Czarism, His work abounds with sentences like: "The October
Revolution advanced with a physical necessity." It has "a deep
natural inevitability." It exemplifies "that mighty development
of great revolutions."1 Despite its obvious bias, which the
author makes no effort to conceal, his study is a historical
document of the first importance for an understanding of the
period from February to October, 1917. It is the most plausible
account the Bolsheviks have given of themselves.
But does it confirm his thesis?
In all of his historical writing two souls struggle within
Trotsky's breast—the soul of the orthodox Marxist who must;
interpret history in line with the dogmas of his monistic creed,
and the soul of the empirical investigator who must follow the
1 Op. #/., voL I, p. 460, vol. HE, p. 260.